Flounder Shortbread Cookie Pops

I made these for my eldest daughter’s 5th birthday. She had a small celebration with her friends at school and I made her a Little Mermaid yogurt cake to take with her. You may remember that last year I had made Hello Kitty cake pops to give to her school mates. So this year, to somewhat keep with the tradition, I decided to make cookie pops to give as party favors. As I put Ariel on the cake, I made the cookies shaped as her friend Flounder. The recipe and the method for these shortbread cookies are the same as for my Baby Shower cookies, but I also added pop sticks to them. They looked quite nice in the end! And with the “stencil method” that I decribed in my previous post, you can easily make your own version of Flounder! Enjoy and have fun!

Cut out and bake the cookies as per this recipe. The only difference is that this time I made “cookie pops”, so I inserted a pop stick into the cookies after cutting them out. Do this slowly so you don’t break the dough. Also, you may want to keep your cookies a bit thicker, just to make sure that they don’t break. Then bake them as per the above mentioned recipe.

Once the cookies have cooled down, prepare the Royal Icing (you can find the recipe and a list of all the tools you need here) and colour it with food colouring (both gels and liquid).

The technique is the same as the one I use for sugar cookies. You start by outlining the shapes with a very thin line of icing and then fill it in (“flooding”). Some people use a thinner consistency of icing to flood the cookies, but I used the same icing (a bit thicker) to outline and flood because it saved me time. Also, I did not have all the tools I needed (I only had a #2 tip and only 1 of those!), so I wanted to keep the icing types to a bare minimum. I also made my own piping bags with baking paper…

After flooding them, I let them dry for a couple of hours and then I used different colours to add more details.

Let them dry overnight before serving them. If you give these as party favors, you can also wrap them in small transparent cello bags/sachets and tie them with colourful ribbons.